DOS ain't dead

EMOB 0.02d - freeware for Ericsson mobile phones (Announce)

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What is EMOB?

EMOB is a freeware program for controlling and managing mobile phones from a PC with a link cable, currently it is hardcoded to use serial Ericsson mobiles.
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Further "old" background is here: http://www.wimborne.org/richard/projects/emob/
(I'm working through updates for all of my website, but a few releases first!)

EMOB v0.02d has technically been in BETA since the end of 2000.... I have now updated the documentation to take it out of BETA as it has received plenty of testing since that time Apart from unpacking the EXE file to make it easier for people to patch the EXE directly, the basic code remains the same.

And although not documented I did find it worked fine with Ericsson's DECT phone systems as well. Certainly it was very useful for getting ID's out.

I hope to relocate version v0.02e at some point as that supported easy sending of text messages from the command-line. However apart from my own use that version never saw even BETA use by others as well I was simply too busy with my work job at the time and to make matters worse a short while later my then girlfriend needed a mobile, so I had to give her one of my DEV phones (which she then broke), so I gave her another (which she also broke...!). She's now my wife so I better be careful what else I say here

EMOB 0.02d - freeware for Ericsson mobile phones

Hmmm, I unpacked EMOB to enable direct access to a EXE patch point that I remembered was in there. However I forgot to update the documentation to explain/how/what/why. Basically it isn't much but if you do a HEX search for the byte sequence "3E 3E 31 3C 3C" which is the following character sequence: "[less than] [less than] [1] [greater than] [greater than]" - you can change the default serial port directly within the EXE rather than having to use the environment variable. The only byte that needs to be changed is obviously the character "1" as the other 4 bytes are just markers to make it stand out.

I did have the feeling there was more you could patch but it doesn't look like I put in other patch points. These days I tend to put very large "PATCH HERE" type statements ! Hopefully I'll relocate the v0.02e source in the not too distant future and will then release that fully as nice to have mobile phone support under DOS particularly code that supports SMS sending etc.

If anyone wonders why all the weird keypresses just to send a message... well unlike Nokia's interface Ericsson in their wisdom at the time *required* that method if you were using ASCII mode interfacing. Nokia however used a far simpler method, thus the next version (which I need to relocate) of Emob v0.02e basically had a look up table to convert from a "normal" command-line format into Ericsson's wonderful "button press" format. Still that aside the phones at the time were pretty neat with their external mini "qwert" keyboard.

And as I have still seen a few of these older Ericsson phones kicking around, I would release in case anyone wanted to use one with DOS for automation etc.